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User talk:Donut Revolutionary
Whats up guys, I finally created an account here. :Donut! How the hell are ya? Turtle Fan 04:54, 15 April 2009 (UTC) Pretty good pretty good, just enjoying the New School now and living in Brooklyn. I'm taking Macro-Economics this semester and Fiction Writting. Looking forward to getting in as a fulltime student, I think that I might major in Literary studies. How have you been? :Not bad. I left NYU because it just wasn't working out and I felt like I was wasting money. I developed a real interest in teaching and finally got onto my town's list of approved substitutes, then almost immediately a long-term substitute assignment fell into my lap. Since the beginning of February I've been teaching three sections of US history to eleventh graders at a school that's all of three minutes away. The experience and face time are both very valuable, but it's annoying because I get the same pay as regular substitutes, who show up at 7:30, hand out sheets someone else already prepared for them, leave at 2:30 and have no work to take home. And I have all the responsibilities (though of course not all the qualifications) of the full-time teachers in the social studies, who average around $60,000/year--and that average goes up quite a lot if you discount two or three non-tenured newbies. :I'm not sure whether the job I have now will still be there next school year--budget cuts. Obama's education aid isn't going to districts like ours, which have a large tax base they can, in theory, hit up. In the fall I'll be starting a Master's in Education at Rutgers either way. If worse comes to worst, I'll tighten my belt till I finish that then hit the job market with an EdM and a year and a fair amount of experience. I should be all right. :I'm looking to spend July and August teaching English at a Jesuit university in Myanmar. People think I'm crazy to want to live in a dictatorship, but it's a safe place to live as a foreigner. At most they might impose a curfew on me. I know how to keep my head down. And if along the way some bright young Burmese students become conversant in the international lingua franca, that makes them more formidable, which makes it harder for the nasty military junta in Yangon to hold them down. :I'm also doing volunteer work with a local youth organization. I find it extremely rewarding. :So that's what I'm up to. Oh, and I was up in Fairfield the other night. A lovely older couple whom I had met as auditors in some of my classes wanted to host me for dinner and they took me to a gorgeous Italian restaurant in a little hole in the wall behind Mo's liquor store that I must have driven past a hundred times and never knew was there. Very upscale--I hadn't realized it but these people are loaded. Then I met a former roommate for a drink at Archie Moore's and we reflected on just how far we haven't come. Turtle Fan 17:58, 15 April 2009 (UTC) By the way, remember to sign talk pages with four tildas so your signature and time stamp can appear. Turtle Fan 17:59, 15 April 2009 (UTC) Thanks for the heads up, I'll remember that in the future about the four tildas. Too bad that you left NYU, as I'm going to school in the same area I sometimes thought that we could run into each other at some point. If it wasn't working out though then I can totally understand. Whats funny is that this year on my birthday I took some of my birthday money to a Barnes and Noble in Park Slope and bought the Years of Rice and Salt finally, and the guy behind the counter started talking to me about SM Stirling and he kind of looked like you, I actually thought that it was you for a minute and that you might be living in the city, I know another "Hey sladejack did I see you?" moment. :P silly me :No, we won't be running into each other. It's for the best that I left NYU, however, though it did provide me with several opportunities which express themselves moving forward now. I'm torn between feeling like I washed out and pride at the idea that I of all people could say to this fancy-shmancy school "I'm sorry, you're just not meeting my needs." Not wanting to be drawn into a discussion of why I was leaving, I told everyone "I'm sorry, I've had to leave New York. I don't want to talk about it" and let them make of it what they may. Hopefully they came up with something entertaining. :I've only been back to the city once since then. I'm afraid the whole thing left me rather weary of New York, as did unfavorable comparisons to Seoul, which is for my money the most wonderful city in the world. Of all the strange things, I actually find myself getting a little nostalgic for the commute once in a while, when I drive past the NJT station--that very commute which I cursed every morning and many evenings and which I kept longing to have done with. Getting time each day, or most days anyway, to sit on a train uninterrupted and read was fun. It also allowed me to clear books off of my reading list pretty quickly, something I definitely haven't been able to do these days. :I've never worked at a B&N. I applied once when I was really desperate for work but they didn't call me for an interview. Just as well; bookstores are where I go to relax, working there would pretty well preclude that. :As for YoRaS, I might discourage you from reading it, if you have other books on your list. I appreciate the ambition of an AH that traces its POD seven centuries out, and like the premise of how the characters keep coming back: a small group of souls who keep being reincarnated together, with very different relationship dynamics and circumstances but still the same personalities. But the early novellas were entertaining reads in their own right but lacked the feeling of being part of a wider story. The later ones could be strung together to create a consistent history but were tedious to read. The constant shifts in writing style were distracting. The Long War was depressingly bleak. Such a unitive force as the story had, the reunions in the Bardo after each life ended, gets kicked to the curb by and by. The between-life postscript to one story opens the door to a fascinating plot development, but that development is immediately discarded in the next story and never seen again. The dynamics of how the reincarnation works are glaringly inconsistent, and the finale is unsatisfying. Oh, and much of the story is driven by parallelism, though not to Turtledovean extent. :Stirling on the other hand I know little of. All I've read by him are the LoC duology and the Nantucket novella he wrote for The First Heroes. I greatly enjoyed the LoC books--They were terrific! I love the pulp SF settings, but since the best stuff, and especially Burroughs's stories, were written several generations ago, they become tough going to the modern reader because everything about them, from diction to plot devices to characters' stereotypes to heroes' attitudes, is so outdated. That will happen to any author eventually, except for a few timeless geniuses like Shakespeare I guess. :The other day I saw the mass market paperback for ItCotCK. I was hoping it would include somewhere in its back pages promises of another LoC book. I continue to feel that the story was left deliberately wide-open to a sequel, but of course if I were to go around submitting that as Evidence! we all know who that would make me. If indeed LoC is meant to end as it did, however, I may have to reconsider my categorical praise; such an inconclusive ending is usually a sign that either the author didn't think his story through and lost interest when he realized more work was needed, or else that he just wants to hit his readers with a big "Fuck you!" Turtle Fan 23:58, 16 April 2009 (UTC) That's pretty cool that the older couple treated you to dinner, I think that I might know what restaurant you are talking about also. :If you're heading north on Rt 1, you pass Mo's Wine and Spirits on the right, and then up just a little ways is a Gulf station. In my mind's eye I remembered the two being next to each other, but there's a small brick building in between them set well back from the road. It contains both a sports bar and this Italian place, whose name, I'm afraid, escapes me. Good food, but very expensive. If I hadn't just seen these people's house I would have ordered very timidly. Turtle Fan 23:58, 16 April 2009 (UTC) That's cool that your teaching also. That sucks about the budget cuts, I'm somewhat disappointed that they would be cutting school budgets of all things considering how big the stimulus plan is. Enjoy Rutgers. :Thanks, I shall endeavor to do so. New Brunswick is a nice town. Of course so is Manhattan way the fuck down by Washington Square, and that didn't help me any. And Fairfield bores me stiff but it's probably where I was met with the most success of my life so far. :As for the stimulus, it's a massive amount of dollars but when you consider the size of the United States you can see how far it needs to be stretched. And the only way education spending provides short-term stimulus, which is what the package was geared to do, is through school construction. Better schools now could give us a comfortable 20s, but that's rarely the timescale on which politicians think. :It's better than nothing, though--the stimulus, that is. I still think it's badly designed but I do believe every little bit helps. Just have to keep an eye on this ballooning deficit. Turtle Fan 23:58, 16 April 2009 (UTC) Myammar? That's brave man. I can totally respect wanting to do something like that. I'm probably going to try to go out of the country at some point soon also, maybe backpack around Europe a bit. :I've kept appraised of the situation there and it seems to be pretty safe for foreigners. I'll be living in the capital, where there's a large international presence and the generals are careful to be on their best behavior. At most they said I might have a curfew imposed on me. I'll have the school's directors' lead to follow vis a vis which envelopes not to push, and my students should be helpful. Yet quite a few people seem to think I'm suicidally stupid for wanting to set foot inside a dictatorship. :Actually, if things keep up, the greatest danger might be when I make my initial stop-off in Bangkok to apply for a visa. I guess I might have to make the visa run elsewhere. If so, a shame; I was looking forward to seeing Bangkok. :Never been outside the country? Well it's a good time to do it. Backpacking across Europe--How classical. :Actually, while my first-hand experience of Europe is rather limited, it's always struck me, most of it, as a cliche tourist trap. And since America is just a European derivative, you get rather less opportunity for real cultural exchange. You will likely find it pleasant just the same, though, especially if you've never seen more exotic continents. :The only place in Europe I feel any great compulsion to visit is, ironically enough, the most nearly-American city of all: London. The Tower, the Globe, Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey. These things call to me, even though I have a historical horror of what they represent (other than the Globe). I had the same feeling in Singapore when I toured the Brits' surviving administration and cultural centers. To think that Saturday will mark one year since I landed in the Lion City . . . I can't decide whether the elapsed time feels like it was too short to have been a year or too long, or most likely both at once; but it doesn't feel like a year on the nose, that's for sure. Turtle Fan 23:58, 16 April 2009 (UTC) User:Donut Revolutionary 1:59 PM 16 April 2009 (UTC) :The signatures go at the end. Turtle Fan 23:58, 16 April 2009 (UTC)